Project on Meta-Framing in Complex Conflicts

We first began to conduct research in this area focusing on “ripeness,” or the conditions necessary for motivating constructive interactions between individuals and groups who are locked-into polarized, destructive conflicts. This often entails a radical shift in intentions, attitudes, and behaviors (from destructive to constructive), and is extremely difficult to achieve due to long histories of animosity, suspicion, fear, and atrocities committed by many of the parties involved. The literature suggests that in prolonged conflicts, ripeness typically occurs as a result of the intense pain, suffering, and sense of dread that accompanies a violent stalemate between the conflicting parties. However, in many intractable conflicts (particularly conflicts over “truth” and “justice”), such suffering has the paradoxical effect of further entrenching the parties in the conflict.

In response to this paradox, we began work on a more comprehensive model for conceptualizing the shift toward constructive interactions in intractable conflicts by initially developing a theoretical model that offered alternative avenues to fostering ripeness through the application of basic Lewinian principles of motivation and change (Coleman, 1997). This model stressed the importance of addressing obstacles or constraints to peaceful encounters, such as a lack of trust, interpersonal contact, and safe channels for communication. We subsequently conducted a laboratory test of the model, which provided preliminary empirical support (Coleman, 2000).

However, as our understanding of various intractable conflicts deepened (such as those regarding the environment and the conflicts in Cyprus and the Middle East), so did our awareness of their complex and dynamic natures. In other words, we began to recognize that viewing conflict at a single point in time, or focusing on a single aspect (e.g. obstacles), was ultimately problematic because it failed to capture the fact that conflict, particularly intractable conflict, is multifaceted; involving multiple experiences and encounters between many different parties over a variety of issues under diverse conditions at different points in time.

Thus, we embarked on a new approach to this work. At a broad level, we began a multi-year project to develop a comprehensive meta-framework for conceptualizing the multitude of conditions and processes that contribute to the self-sustaining dynamics of protracted conflicts. It builds on four basic premises regarding contemporary conflict: 1) our world is becoming increasingly more complex, ecologically, politically, economically, and socially; 2) human systems are ever-changing and the pace of change is rising; 3) such complexity and dynamism place extraordinary demands on our capacities to accurately comprehend enduring conflicts; and 4) this often leads to an over-reliance on our primary frames of understanding which are useful but limited and can over-simplify our sense of problems. As a result, much of the research on intractability is either fine-grained and piecemeal; focusing on independent cause and effect relationships at single levels of analysis (e.g. studying individuals without consideration of the society in which the conflict is occurring), or case studies of specific situations viewed through a particular disciplinary lens. Similarly, our interventions, often based on the findings of such research, have limited effects or worse, unintended negative consequences which fuel the conflicts.

The metaframework offers an alternative approach. Its primary objective is to cultivate a dynamic sense of conflicts which correspond as much as possible to the complex environments in which they exist, while remaining sufficiently comprehensible and navigable. Using a conceptual platform derived from dynamical systems theory, it portrays intractable conflicts broadly as complex, non-linear systems sustained in a state of destructiveness by a variety of emergent, embedded, and automatic processes. For example, within a particular school system violent norms for resolving conflict can emerge from repeated hostile interactions between many different individuals over time. However, these interactions and norms are likely to be embedded within a school, a community, and a culture that either tolerates or somehow legitimizes or rewards youth violence. Overtime, if left unaddressed, children become socialized to such norms and thus respond automatically with violence even in the absence of serious provocation or cultural legitimization. Thus, long-term patterns of violence in the school become stable and multipli-determined. The systems frame stresses the highly interdependent nature of various aspects of the problem of school violence (automatic reactions, interpersonal interactions, norms, policies, etc), which interact and feedback across multiple levels of the system (students, groups, school, community, etc.) and serve to sustain the problem.

Although the meta-framework applies the systems frame as a starting point, it ultimately emphasizes the need to employ multiple paradigms and methods for diagnosing conflict in order to best comprehend the many sources and dynamics of intractability in any given setting. Thus, in order to more fully comprehend ongoing patterns of school violence, we must understand the political, economic, social, cultural, and pathological dimensions of the problem which contribute to its intractability. Developed from current literatures on dynamical systems, realism, human relations, postmodernism, and the health sciences, the meta-framework offers a preliminary set of frames and guidelines for research and intervention with intractable problems that is informed in the dynamics of complex systems. The meta-framework is currently being published as a three-paper series in Peace and Conflict, the journal of the Peace Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association (see Coleman 2003, 2004, forthcoming).